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Managing Podcasts

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Q:How do I view my entire library of collected podcasts? And how do I delete some without deleting every one from that particular source?

- Scooter

A: In iTunes 7, all Podcasts are grouped under a “Podcasts” item in the iTunes source list.

If the “Podcasts” entry does not appear in the source list, it may be hidden. You can enable the display of this and other source list categories by going into iTunes’ General Preferences, and simply selecting that categories that you want to see.

Selecting the “Podcasts” item from the source list will display a listing of all of your podcast subscriptions in iTunes. Each podcast subscription appears in this list, and you can click on the small triangle that appears to the left of each podcast subscription to expand that list and see the individual episodes of that podcast that are currently available on your computer, and any recent episodes that have not yet been downloaded.

To remove a specific podcast episode, just highlight the individual episode under the podcast subscription, and delete it as you would any other iTunes track. That particular episode will be removed, and iTunes will prompt you as to whether you want to delete the underlying file or keep it, as it would do for any other library entry.

Further, if you have iTunes set to only keep a certain number of podcast episodes, but there’s a specific episode that you want to keep, you can exempt it from iTunes’ auto-deletion feature by right-clicking on that particular podcast episode, and choosing “Do Not Auto Delete.” This will leave that particular podcast episode in your iTunes library until you either delete it manually, you go back to the track and change the setting back to “Allow Auto Delete.”

You can also apply the “Do Not Auto Delete” setting to an entire podcast subscription in the same manner—just right-click on the podcast subscription heading instead of on an individual episode, and choose “Do Not Auto-Delete” and iTunes will keep all of the episodes in that podcast, both current and future, until you delete them manually.